With its bright colors, it lived up to those
poetic names of blood flower and blood foam that the industry
confers on its finest exhibits. Coral sells for as much as 500
francs per kilogram, and in this locality the liquid strata hid
enough to make the fortunes of a whole host of coral fishermen.
This valuable substance often merges with other polyparies,
forming compact, hopelessly tangled units known as "macciota,"
and I noted some wonderful pink samples of this coral.
But as the bushes shrank, the tree forms magnified.
Actual petrified thickets and long alcoves from some fantastic
school of architecture kept opening up before our steps.
Captain Nemo entered beneath a dark gallery whose gentle slope
took us to a depth of 100 meters. The light from our glass coils
produced magical effects at times, lingering on the wrinkled roughness
of some natural arch, or some overhang suspended like a chandelier,
which our lamps flecked with fiery sparks. Amid these shrubs
of precious coral, I observed other polyps no less unusual:
melita coral, rainbow coral with jointed outgrowths, then a few
tufts of genus Corallina, some green and others red, actually a type
of seaweed encrusted with limestone salts, which, after long disputes,
naturalists have finally placed in the vegetable kingdom.
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